It's the end of the world again. A group of film students and their professor are out somewhere in the woods to shoot a horror movie when the news hit: A nearly inexplicable wave of violence hits the world. It seems like the dead are coming back to life to devour the flesh of the living.
Our small group of survivors decides to get into their camping van and get back to their families. On their way, they stop and pick up Debra (Michelle Morgan), the girlfriend of director Jason (Joshua Close). Debra is one of those believable women with high survivability in life or death situations who are George Romero's way of doing penitence for Barbara.
They decide to try and reach Debra's family first. Of course, this being the apocalypse, their way is fraught with dangers, some of them including the living dead, others Jason's growing obsession with filming their ordeal to document it and last but most important: other people.
So, this is what happens when George A. Romero finally decides to accept his role in horror as "the zombie guy" - an unexpected (and much more original than it is given credit for) mixture of old standards, newish trends (the movie is filmed in the popular in my house "fake authentic footage" style) and the zombie apocalypse as a way of thinking about the parts of our world that interest Romero the most at the moment.
In this case Romero tries to come to terms with the ubiquity of mediated experiences in the age of the digital camera and YouTube. What is better: a clearly manipulated traditional media or a choir of voices so large that it can be hard to understand what it says? Why do we film the catastrophe? Is it really to document? To keep others informed? Is it a way to survive without having to do the rotten things survivors do? A psychological armor? And what does it say about a movie that shows us an imaginary apocalypse?
At first, Romero seems to go for the very easy answers conservative media critics love so much, but the farther the film goes along, the more obvious it gets that Romero doesn't have clear answers for us and is much more interested in asking questions and exploring areas of thought while (and I do love him for that) still staying true to his cast as characters and not just mouthpieces for ideas.
Romero does this with great success. Somehow, offhandedly, he also manages to create an excellent zombie film of a much more harrowing and claustrophobic type than Land of the Dead was.
There is an elegance in the tonal shifts between the abstract, the funny and the downright disturbing I have not seen in Romero's films before.
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